Post by Vits on Sept 1, 2018 17:26:20 GMT
What is SPEED RACER supposed to be? The visual style, the over-the-top races, the few 4th-wall-breaking moments and the lines said by TRIXIE (the title character's girlfriend) suggest that it's supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek movie for people to laugh at the old cartoon while remembering it with nostalgia. However, the 135-minute runtime, the conflicts, the sad way the indentity of the man known as RACER X is revealed (unlike in the cartoon where it was always obvious and played for laughs) and the lines said by characters who aren't TRIXIE suggest that it's supposed to be a serious movie. The Wachowskis never made up their minds. Also, I think they must've thought "There's no way to film the race scenes without CGI. If we switch from green screen to real backgrounds it might distract the audience, so we should film everything with green screen for consistency". Maybe not, but you see where I'm going with this, right? Unless you're 100% sure that the visual effects will look real, you shouldn't saturate your movie with them. That's why movies like AVATAR work. Here, everything looks so fake that it made my eyes hurt. Too bad, because the design was very creative. Making it a live-action anime (changing settings through moving heads; over-the-top zoom-ins) was an interesting decision, but almost every conversation scene (without flashbacks) is boring. Because of everything I've said, it's hard to say whether the directing is good or bad. Was SPRITLE (the title character's little brother) originally supposed to have a smaller role but, at some point, someone demanded that he had to be shoven down the viewers' throats? I felt that because he constantly does things that are irrelevant to the plot and, yet, has almost enough screen time to be a protagonist, while the real protagonist isn't very interesting. Maybe I'm wrong, but either way, the combination of the script and Paulie Litt's performance make him an unbearable and unfunny character. John Goodman, Susan Sarandon and Matthew Fox's performances are decent, but Emile Hirsch isn't really given much to work with.
3/10
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You can read comments of other movies in my blog.
3/10
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You can read comments of other movies in my blog.
